Sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

How can we possibly think that an interconnected world such as ours with all of its glorious industrial magic, stuff so beyond each one of us but applied through the efforts of many, is anything but a truly connected and truly integrated society?

The whole alienation thing only applies to someone from a pre-industrial society watching as industry comes up around them and trying to make sense of it all. The reality is that we as a species are probably more social, more connected, less alienated than any other species on the planet.

Also, to get back to what you were saying, that (buying what we use, buying what we thinkg) is actually one of the critiques of Marx's theory of alienation and commodity fetishism. What if Marxism itself becomes a commodity fetish to the point of alienating others. Think about that one for a bit (yeah, once a philosophy becomes a caricature of its critique it sort of invalidates itself).

Joe Biden on LaGuardia Airport: 'I must be in some third-world country'Vice President Joe Biden is very unhappy about America's declining infrastructure. During a speech in Philadelphia today, he threw New York's LaGuardia Airport under the bus to drive that point home. But first, the vice president talked about advancements overseas. "If I blindfolded someone and took him at 2 o'clock in the morning into the airport in Hong Kong and said, 'Where do you think you are?’ He’d say, ‘This must be America. It’s a modern airport,'" Biden said. International airports have indeed seen some stunning innovations recently.

"If I took you and blindfolded you and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you'd think, ‘I must be in some third-world country,’" Biden said. When his statement drew laughter from the crowd, Biden quickly noted, "I'm not joking." To further illustrate just how bad things have become, he pointed to statistics from the World Economic Forum. "Just in the last decade, the United States has fallen 20 spots when it comes to the quality of infrastructure," Biden said. "It's embarrassing, and it's stupid. It's stupid."

"That puts us literally behind, they rank us behind Barbados," Biden said. "Great country. One airport." Biden's remarks came during the unveiling of Amtrak's newest rail engine. "Why did we lead the world economically for so long? We had the most modern infrastructure in the world," he said. Despite being one of the most popular airports in the world, LaGuardia is often criticized by travelers for its dated or "unique" facilities.